‘Let the games begin.’ So ended the first post, dated 18 April 2009, of a blog beguilingly styled Fake IPL Player. It was, indeed, the eve of the second Indian Premier League. The ‘games’ of the next two months, however, revolved mainly around the identity of the writer, who appeared uncannily well informed of events within Shah Rukh Khan’s troubled Kolkata Knight Riders.
FIP, as he shortened himself, quickly gathered an online audience, intrigued by his insights and amused by his nicknames, puckish (Saala Slimeball for Lalit Modi), punning (Junta Tormenter for Ajantha Mendis) and penile (Vinnie Dildo for Khan himself). When, after a few days, the blog was linked to by Cricinfo, a succès d’estime became a succès de scandale. At its peak, FIP’s blog was receiving 150 000 visitors a day—equal almost to the traffic on Aamir Khan’s site.
Journalists followed FIP compulsively. KKR’s management reportedly went on a hunt for the blogger in their own ranks, and rumours surrounded the departure from their camp of Aakash Chopra and Sanjay Bangar. FIP subsequently flirted with revealing his identity, before changing his mind and posting a YouTube video of his shadow. The change of mind is now explained: FIP, still anonymous, has now novelised his prank in The Gamechangers.
Assuming, of course, it’s the same Fake IPL Player. It could be an impostor. One wonders how a Fake Fake IPL Player could be discredited. On the contrary, given that the original flaunted phoniness in his name, Fake IPL Players could multiply endlessly, like Agent Smiths in The Matrix, or the eponymous lookalikes of Being John Malkovich.
The novelist—let us call him that for convenience’s sake—seems to grasp this. Transplanting events from South Africa to England, introducing various subplots and changing the IPL to the IBL (Indian Bollywood League), KKR to the Calcutta Cavalry, Shah Rukh Khan to Sigwald Raees Kahn and Lalit Modi to Lalu Parekh, he has produced a work of fiction about a blog of fiction concerning a club of fiction that nonetheless resonates with reality, because it is a book concerned with a writer declining to divulge his identity written by a writer declining to divulge his identity.
The Gamechangers is a sharp, slick and funny read, with a droll take on its characters’ delusions of grandeur. ‘To succeed in politics one needs to rise above one’s principles’, it is observed of the IBL’s founder at one point. ‘Being a man of low principles, Lalu Parekh had an unfair advantage in this matter.’ Sigwald Raees Kahn is persuaded by a lackey that his club should simply be called Cavalry: ‘People support Calcutta Cavalry because you own the team, not because it’s named after Calcutta … We shall quietly remove the word Calcutta from our logo. No one will even notice it’. Young Indian players used to be so inarticulate, it is mused. No longer:
These days, young Indian cricketers entered the arena with a much wider vocabulary, thanks primarily to exposure to Australian cricket. Now they knew at least a dozen variations of the word ‘fuck’ and their appropriate usage in different contexts during a game. The India under-19 captain player once famously used the word as a noun, adjective and verb in the same sentence. The smarter of the lot had learnt to pepper on-field conversations with pleasantries like ‘asshole’ and ‘son of a bitch’, and end every interview with ‘cheers’, irrespective of what preceded it. And when posed with a question they couldn’t understand, they had programmed themselves to automatically say, ‘I play my natural game’.
The focus of The Gamechangers, however, is subtly different to that of the original blog: the novelist is as exercised by the question of Fake IPL Player’s spontaneous popularity as by the IPL. His ruminations on authenticity emerge in the asides of the blogger’s fictional pursuers, detective Parminder Mahipal Singh and sidekick geek Ashok Ramaswamy, who finally conclude that ‘in this circus that’s going on, he’s probably the only thing that’s not fake’, and who as the book ends feel so complicit in the deception as to contemplate colluding in it.
In an interview posted on his site, the novelist invokes as inspiration Barry Levinson’s movie Wag the Dog (1997), in which a White House strategist hires a Hollywood producer to stage a foreign war requiring American involvement in order to distract from a presidential sex scandal. The parallel is useful but inexact; Levinson’s plot stretched credulity too far. A better comparison would be Primary Colours (1996), the roman à clef of Bill Clinton’s 1992 American presidential campaign published anonymously by Newsweek’s Joe Klein.
Klein’s novel about the charismatic but priapic senator Jack Stanton was an immediate sensation on its release, becoming to the Beltway what OJ would become to the rest of the United States. First there was the guessing game about the characters’ real-life counterparts: whether the narrator, Henry Burton, for instance, was really Clinton’s campaign manager, George Stephanopoulos. Second was the guessing game about the writer: Stephanopoulos was again a suspect.
Primary Colours succeeded for a variety of reasons, not least because it was a very good novel as well as an entertaining parlour game, but also because of something it was not: it was not authorised. It radiated a deep cynicism not only about politics but about the way politics was reported by what the novel called ‘the scorps’—short for the press corps, but also suggestive of their malign nature. It provided a fictional counterpart to DA Pennebaker’s audacious fly-on-the-wall documentary The War Room, in which Stephanopoulos and his colourful confederate, James Carville, were seen harnessing the suggestibility of American voters in a campaign of attractive nothingness.
Although it turned out to have been written by an outsider, Primary Colours felt real, felt ‘true’—truer at least than the reporting of the compromised, captive media. It was brave; it was provocative; it contained sufficient corroborative detail to, as Pooh-Bah puts it in The Mikado, ‘give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative’. It came to occupy the space in the political narrative that had previously been filled by investigative journalism, as during the later scandals of the Clinton presidency did the seemingly disreputable but increasingly unmissable online news website, Drudge Report.
FIP was a third, hybrid creation: a Primary Colours posing as a Drudge Report. Or, to be more precise, it was a Primary Colours that its readers wanted to believe was a Drudge Report: a well-constructed fiction, composed to cohere with well-established stereotypes but sprinkled with close observation, whose public grew inclined to treat it as the good oil, the inside dope. Because, of course, a sizeable proportion of its readers were journalists, as Parminder Singh exposits towards the end of The Gamechangers:
He knew that they [the media] wanted sensational stories and he put it out for them. Just think about it—an anonymous fringe player in a high-profile team, feels hard done by the system and is using this opportunity to unmask people and destroy reputations. Wow! What a story. Could there be anything more dramatic? He knew that the media would lap it up. And once they did, all he had to do was keep them hooked with his scandalous revelations. Every time the media went cold on FIP, he would come out with the next Big Bang … This was all news, to be printed, broadcast and consumed.
This is the most interesting dimension of the FIP phenomenon: what it says about the public’s ambivalent relationship with established news sources. Two factors seem to be mingled in its success: firstly, its apparent subversion of the sports–industrial complex, reflecting a belief that the media is simply in thrall to power; secondly, a sort of indifference as to whether news is actually true—as long, at least, as it is entertaining and tends to reinforce established prejudices.
The second of the aforementioned factors is a popular hobby horse of observers and critics of media: the steady substitution of news by gossip; the increasingly porous boundary between fact and fiction. The first, however, has specific application to the IPL. Modi has sought at every stage to constrain, control and direct coverage of his brainchild. The IPL provides its own feed to Sony, employing its own commentators, and strives to dominate online coverage, operating its own website; it imposes significant restrictions on those journalists and photographers it does accredit.
This is part of an overall effort to fit the packaging to the product, for T20 cricket is above all a product—and a fabulous one at that, for all the reasons Test cricket is an unsatisfactory one. Consider: if I want to see Sachin Tendulkar bat, should I attend the first day of a Test, or should I turn on the TV to watch the Mumbai Indians? At the Test, I might see him bat all day, but I might not see him at all; when I change the channel to watch the Mumbai Indians, I not only know I’ll see him bat but that he’ll be playing shots, and when he gets out I can switch back to a soap opera. Test cricket can be slow, but it is from an entertainment point of view completely unpredictable; T20 is fast, but in entertainment terms perfectly generic. And generic games, or so it is felt, require generic coverage.
Respected writers and broadcasters have run that generic gauntlet with varying degrees of success. In general, however, the coverage often looks suspiciously like propaganda, full of contrived sensation but ultimately as controversial as milk. In the short term, this makes for a readily digestible product; in the long term, it engenders cynicism, even contempt, if not for cricket, certainly for those who report it. Fake IPL Player prospered from the attention of two groups of readers on the same continuum: a first group who, bored with the sanitised pap of the mainstream authorised media, hankered for a well-connected but non-partisan unauthorised alternative; a second group indifferent to whether it was bullshit providing it was fun. If we let the former down, we forfeit the right to complain about the proliferation of the latter.